Brianna Wu for Congress

On November 9th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

In response to this, Brianna Wu announced her own intentions to run for office in Massachusetts' 8th District.[1] After testing the waters for some time and gauging the approval of her associates before she decided to run,[2] she made it "official" on November 27th, 2016, though she didn't make clear what position, exactly, she was running for.[3] She would later solidify that she was running for congress later that same day.[4]

She got a political site to solicit donations up on January 5th, 2017.[5]

Her first political ad went up in early January, wherein she proceeded to blatantly fearmonger over Trump and then discussed her victory over Gamergate. The ad consisted of shutterstock footage and clips from various news-casts that had thrown up smear-pieces on Trump during the election. Brianna Wu declares in the ad that she "fought the Alt-Right during Gamergate and she'll fight them in congress, too."[6]

Wu registered to run for office on February 22nd, 2017, for Massachusetts' 8th district.[7][8][9] She is running as a Democrat. This puts her in conflict with Representative Stephen Lynch, an established Democrat with years of work in the district.

Contents

Platform

According to Brianna Wu's own website,[10] her platform comprises three specific things:

A High Tech Economy for Massachusetts

Massachusetts leads the nation in education spending, investing over 24 percent more in each student than the national average. But unfortunately, we don't do enough to ensure jobs for those students once they graduate. The status-quo representation in district 8 doesn't understand the tech and biotech industry, but Brianna Wu does. We'll make Massachusetts the third great city in the US for the these high paying fields. We know what it takes to attract tech and biotech investment. We speak often of the bias against women and minorities in the high tech workforce. Because Massachusetts has some of the nation's strongest protections, we can make this the best place in the United States for the rest of us to work. It's time for bold leadership to bring 21st century jobs to district 8.

Landmark Legislation on Privacy and Cybersecurity

Here's a plain truth: People that understand technology do not have a voice in congress. Our tech policy is bought and paid for by special interests. Your privacy, your security, your ability to freely access information is being eroded every single day by policy that doesn't have your interests at heart. As a software engineer and technology analyst, Brianna Wu understands technology in a way no one else in congress does. She will be a fearless voice for privacy rights. One of her top priorities will be to get an omnibus privacy bill passed. Cybersecurity isn't just a consumer issue, it's a national security issue. Our energy, financial and information infrastructure is very vulnerable to hacking, and nothing is being done. Brianna Wu will change that.

Keep Massachusetts Tax Dollars in Massachusetts

As Republicans scramble to disassemble the Affordable Care Act, it will cost 353 billion dollars over the next decade. States like Massachusetts will be stuck with the bill for their reckless budgeting choices. It's time for Massachusetts to stop subsidizing the conservative assault on American infrastructure. Because Massachusetts pays so much more into the federal government than we get back, we are in a powerful negotiating position. States that destroy cost-saving measures like the Affordable Care Act should expect to clean up their messes with their own tax dollars. Massachusetts is a state that proves investing in education and health care works. But, we pay our own way. As your representative, Brianna will fight to keep more of your tax dollars invested in Massachusetts.

To date, Brianna has made at least 36 promises on Twitter, from everything from cybersecurity to not clapping for Trump to tax credits for solar panels to universal basic income. None of these empty promises have any plan behind them, showing she has the mentality of an 8th grader running for class president rather than someone running for federal office.

Major Problems

A number of major hurdles with Brianna Wu's above policies become readily apparent when analyzed.
More will be added here as time allows.

Political Gaffes

Wu also has a number of political gaffes under her belt. Below are some of the best-known examples.

Never a Resident

Brianna Wu has never been a resident of the 8th district in Massachusetts, which is where she is running.
While not illegal, this activity is frowned upon; it is typically seen as "district shopping" done by politicians who have no interest in helping the people they represent.

FEC Financing

On March 12th, 2017, the Federal Election Commission put up a public notice that Brianna Wu had failed to make public her campaign finances within the appointed time limit.[11] The report indicates that while Brianna registered to run back in December, and named Brianna Wu for Congress as her committee, she had to register her committee within ten days of that. Frank did it for her instead in mid-February, and now Brianna's campaign has to explain to the FEC why it took two months or face fines.

One of the first repeat issue to come up in Brianna Wu's attempted congressional run was the continued absence of Natalie O'Brien, who Brianna Wu has been pathologically unable to prove the existence of, even as she is facing additional scrutiny from her political campaign.[12][13] Brianna Wu has yet to prove that this woman exists, which may prove troublesome later on when candidates are required by law to give a strict reporting of their finances.

Abuse of Power

Brianna Wu announces her intentions to harass people with subpoena authority if elected.

As of March 1st, 2017, she has announced her intention to engage in several such actions, including launching investigations the FBI for their failure to stop GamerGate from harassing her,[14] launching congressional subpeonas for alleged sexism in the tech industry,[15] and having an Arcade cabinet installed in her office on the public dime.[16]

Lunar Terrorism

Brianna Wu transcends humanity and becomes a living meme.

On February 28th, 2017, Brianna Wu put up a series of tweets cautioning against allowing large businesses to access the moon - and furthermore stating that rocks dropped from the Moon would have the payload equivalent of hundreds of nuclear bombs,[17] and suggested that corporations could use the moon to launch terrorist attacks by "hurling rocks at the Earth." Brianna Wu was immediately called into question on this, and was quickly subjected to widespread ridicule[18][19][20] - not only because of her ignorance of physics or science, but because of how ridiculous the concept was. Within hours, Brianna Wu deleted the tweets and declared that the entirely-justified criticism she received was harassment, and that she received it solely because she was a woman who was online.[21] This, in turn, received widespread mockery and Brianna Wu was transformed overnight into a punchline.

Brianna's initial attempts at damage control for this gaffe ended in failure; the tweets had gone viral on Twitter, and between the initial tweets themselves, Brianna Wu's attempts to justify them, and then trying to pawn the whole thing off as being harassment against her for being a woman and/or the work of Gamergate, Brianna Wu ultimately only made the situation infinitely worse, resulting in massively increased awareness of her outlandish behavior. She was mocked by multiple websites, including The Hill,[22] Twitchy,[23] The Federalist,[24] and The Washington Times.[25] Following this, Brianna Wu proceeded to declare that covering this massive gaffe was "targeted harassment," and attempted to reach out to both Twitter and Facebook's staff in an attempt to get the incident scrubbed from the record.[26]

In many ways, this incident is somewhat analogous to Brianna Wu's infamous Trans Samus Incident. Both events led off with Brianna Wu starting with an incredibly shaky position, which despite the inherent flaws in her argument, she attempted to defend vigorously, to the point of becoming outright combative on social media in its defense. In both cases she then proceeded to pretend she had never made the mistake while deleting everything she could of it, and managed to make herself out to be a fool in the process and being ridiculed by virtually every party involved.